I don't own Danny Phantom.

Disclaimer 2: I have no clue how a violent genetic tug-of-war would affect someone... so don't take it seriously xD

Hellbreaker: Yeah, they'll need some easing into the idea. Well, a lot actually. The abrupt ways they found out in the episodes were too sudden.

Sorry for the later chapter... I just came back from vacation. It was quite relaxing, and I'm feeling refreshed (although still dealing with jet lag) so the next few days should be productive!

As Danny's eyes fluttered shut, Jazz had a mini panic attack. "Danny...!" she yelped, kneeling beside him and shaking him. "Wake up! Stay with us!" His face was too pale, black hair sharply contrasting with it, eyes sunken and shadowed, chest barely rising and falling. The thinner skin around his arm was cracking slightly, and there were several rising bruises around the thinner skin farther away from the arm. He looked ghostly, and not in a good way.

A touch on her arm startled her into whirling. Tucker smiled weakly. "He's fine, Jazz. Or as fine as he can be at the moment." He eyed the unconscious boy worriedly. "Just sleeping. How bad do you think it hurt him? I mean, it was tearing him apart at the genetic level... even if it didn't get very far, that's gotta have a major impact on him."

"He heals fast," Sam interjected, grasping for anything that would help the situation seem less hopeless.

"We're gonna have to hope he can heal from this." Tucker might have said more, but thudding sounds originating from the stairs caught their attention, sending their hearts thudding and adrenaline spiking through their veins. "Oh, crap..."

Jack was coming. He'd noticed the missing keys, and remembered that odd feeling he'd had just before Sam had asked him about the Fenton Phantasmic Fooler (something that created illusions to redirect a ghost's attention): that feeling as Tucker passed him that the keys were sliding out of his pocket somehow. He didn't know why, but somehow it seemed the trio that had come into the basement had done so with the singular intention to steal his keys.

In Danny's room, the three still on their feet stared at each other, trapped. What do we do? If Jack noticed the bracelet was missing – and saw the effects it'd had on him – he'd no doubt be suspicious. Then again, he'd probably noticed the keys were missing... and was already suspicious.

Sam glanced around. Her mind had gone into overdrive again, processing things much faster than usual, Jack's footsteps sounding almost in slow motion. If he'll be suspicious either way, then the best thing we can do is make sure he sees as little as possible. She stuck the deadly little bracelet in her pocket, then motioned quietly to the other two. The footsteps were almost to the door. "C'mon," she whispered. "We gotta get him outta here."

Tucker and Jazz lugged Danny to the closet and shut him in, while Sam hid the keys in between the mattress and box spring. They all rushed to the middle of the floor, scattering random schoolbooks around themselves, as the door shook with the force of Jack's knocking. "Hey, open up!" Jack called.

Sam and Tucker finished organizing their cover as Jazz went to answer the door. "Hey Dad," she squeaked. "I was just helping the other two with their homework... Danny volunteered to go pick up some food at the Nasty Burger, he isn't here..."

Jack paused in the doorway, brow furrowed. They sounded normal enough. But now that he was alarmed enough to pay attention, he observed their pale, terrified faces and jerky, controlled movements. What is going on? Maddie would probably know. She was better at reading people – and teenagers – than he was. He sighed. "Jasmine, my keys have gone missing. Do you know where they went?"

"No." She tried to look confused. "Maybe a ghost got out of the Zone and stole them?"

This idea was tempting, and certainly made sense, but he couldn't get her strained expression out of his mind. Still... it didn't seem that this line of questioning was getting anywhere. Maybe Danny would know. "Maybe." He backed through the doorway. I'll ask Danny when he gets home from the Nasty Burger. "Never mind, then." He closed the door and stumped away, mind intent on the couch in the front room. No way Danny could sneak past him then!

Jazz breathed a shaky sigh of relief as the big man's footsteps receded back down the stairs. "Whew."

"Crap," Tucker summed up recent events bluntly. "Now even Jack's suspicious. It's really good that Maddie isn't home... she'd have figured it out already."

"You're telling me," Sam sighed, slumping against the bed for a moment. She stared toward the closet. Danny would be fine there for the moment, it wasn't airtight and he wasn't in convulsions... "Do you think he's all right?"

"Dunno," Tucker mumbled, glancing furtively at the closet door before pulling his eyes quickly away. "We just gotta hope, and in the mean time figure out how we'll keep the Fentons from seeing the missing bracelet... and its aftereffects on Danny..."

Sam sighed in frustration, plucking the bracelet out of her pocket and studying it hard. "I don't really see how it works... Danny was down there while they built it, he might know how it's made and how to deactivate its properties... but I doubt it's a good idea to tinker with it unless we know what we're doing." Memories crossed her mind... broken, glitchy, or failed inventions, all exploding, blasting or otherwise doing something terribly dangerous, usually around Danny. Or maybe that was just the only time she noticed it.

"Mom will be home soon," Jazz observed quietly. "I think we have to wake Danny up, if only to see if he knows how to take the bracelet apart."

Tucker looked up sharply. "Are you crazy? He just got zapped by that bracelet – it did who-knows-what amount of damage to him – and you wanna interfere with whatever healing factor he's managed to hang onto?"

Jazz winced. "No... I just don't see another choice. Do you?" she added, somewhat belligerently.

Tucker's jaw clenched. "I can take a look at it. I got a look at their technical plans down there..."

"Can you trust that you wouldn't turn it into some kind of force field that will effect him without touching him, or something?"

Silence. She nodded grimly, turning without a word toward the closet.

"I can take it somewhere else and try there," he muttered. His voice was weak; he had already given up the fight.

"We don't have time," she whispered, pulling the closet door quietly open and staring at Danny. He looked no different than he had when they'd put him in there; pale, silent and bruised. Steeling herself, she reached out and touched his shoulder, shaking him gently. "Danny?"

There was no response for a long moment, and her heart skipped several beats, lodging in her throat painfully enough to make her eyes water. She swallowed hard, then nearly cried out with relief when the boy twitched, just slightly, turning his head toward her and cracking his eyes open. "Jazz?" His voice sounded hoarse and exhausted, cracking slightly in suppressed pain.

"Do you know how to take the bracelet apart, take out whatever causes that reaction? We can't just take it off you, they'd notice."

"They'll still notice their inventions'll still target me tomorrow," he managed, brow furrowing slightly.

"We'll worry about that later. Your dad is already suspicious about the missing keys." Jazz filled him in quickly on the little encounter. "We'd have more time to plan if you still appeared to have the bracelet on."

He nodded minutely. "Inside... the band. There's a strip of metal... the outside is just decorative, the inside is colored a bit differently and is the real problem. You'll have to slide it out of the bracelet..." his voice gave out, and he let his head fall back.

She nodded with more energy this time. "We'll get it," she assured him. He made no response; unsure if he could hear her, she hovered awkwardly for a moment before turning to go back to the other two.

They'd already heard the ghost-boy's faded words; Tucker had the bracelet in his lap, looking carefully at the inside of it. "I see the strip... what did he mean by 'slide it out'?"

"Is there a slit in the side or something?" Sam suggested, reaching over to turn it slightly. She touched the band, gingerly at first, half expecting a shock, then more confidently. Pressing hard, she attempted to make it slide some direction. It didn't budge.

"No, there's gotta be a catch somewhere that's holding it in," Tucker mumbled absently. "They wouldn't make it slide out so easily. The plans they had... they were pretty simple, except for the latch and the makeup of that middle band. If I can just remember how they slipped that middle band in..." He continued muttering to himself as he fiddled with the band, turning it over and tweaking it here and there.

There was a long silence after his muttering petered out; Sam and Jazz sat mutely, staring at each other without registering what they were seeing, minds in turmoil. There was too much going on... too much bad luck in this day...

Bad luck, Sam observed suddenly, with dark humor. If Johnny escaped the Ghost Zone and is hanging around, I'm going to kill him... painfully. The thought helped her mood a little; she actually smiled a little. It would be nice if solving their problems was always as simple as stuffing a ghost into the Fenton Thermos.

"Aha!"

The exclamation from Tucker brought about a fairly violent response in the other two. Jazz jumped about two feet into the air from a sitting position; Sam jumped too, whirling in midair and landing in a crouched fighting position. Both girls looked somewhat sheepishly at each other as they realized what had happened; then it was forgotten as the tone of voice registered. "You got it out?" Sam demanded.

"Yeah!" Tucker held up a strip of reddish metal, then the separated decorative part of the bracelet made of greenish metal. "The slit was in the latch... the red metal is actually flexible, it's the decorative part that held its shape. So I had to find the slit just behind the latch and bend the red metal to get it out of there. It was hidden pretty well... gotta give them that." He glared distastefully at the reddish stuff. "Whaddya think we do with this?"

"Hide it, for now." Sam plucked it out of his hand with two fingers, dangling it like a poisonous snake. Well, she liked poisonous snakes... a pink dress, then.

"I have a lot of good hiding places in my room, and they'll never think to look there," Jazz volunteered.

"What do you hide there?" Tucker inquired, with a suggestive snicker. The removal of the strip had released a lot of the tension in the room; they had more to do, but at least this dangerous object was out of the picture for now.

She blushed. "Nothing. I just have hiding places, in case I did need to hide something..."

"Suuure."

"Moving on!" Jazz rushed. "I'll hide the metal in my room. You get the bracelet's shell back on his wrist; the middle band was only on the inside, so there'll be no sign that it was ever off. And someone has to return Jack's keys..."

Sam winced. "I'll do that part. Tucker is already under suspicion, I think..."

Jazz nodded and pulled the red strip from Sam's grip. "Kay then." She left the room.

Tucker picked up the bracelet shell and the keys and went to the closet. Carefully, he shut the bracelet around Danny's wrist, then latched it. "Hey, Danny? That doesn't hurt, does it?" he asked tentatively, in an undertone. Who knows what energies the bracelet might've absorbed?

The merest thread of a whisper. "No, I'm good."

"Good," he muttered in relief. "Now we just hafta make sure the keys are returned, your signature is hidden for next week, and nothing was permanently damaged..."

Danny moved his head and looked at him, managing to smile. "I'll be all right."

Tucker nodded, moving away. Once out of earshot of the half-conscious boy, he muttered to himself, "That's what scares me. You'll be all right... for how long, and at what cost?"

Sam picked up the keys wordlessly, communicating with her eyes her matching concern for Danny, and turned also to leave the room.

Silence descended over them all.

I have a couple ways I'm thinking to finish off this story. One way has them figuring out his secret; the other doesn't. Preferences, anyone?